This isn't antialiased, I ran out of patience. At 800 x 600, I think it would have been somewhere around an 8 to 10 hr. render! All clouds are volumetric spheres. The cloud in front of the mountain is made up of 3 or 4 spheres slightly offset to give it more density. The key to this image is lighting. The clouds behind the mounain were pretty flat until I aimed some spots at them from above and put some big point lights inside them. The point light really bring out a lot more detail in the clouds. These clouds could really be useful if they didn't take so darn long to render.

They are fantastic ! I just wish the next version of Vue will take care of artifacts like visible parts of transparent spheres. I wouldn't mind waiting longer if the volumetric materials were displayed correctly.

So realistic! Well worth the effort (and time). Lin

Whao! Great picture Jim! Thank you for keeping us in the loop. I'm going to try this.

Wow. I've tried (and failed) to get realistic clouds using photos and alpha planes so I've followed your experimenting with interest. This is quite an achievement. Thanks for sharing. Great picture.

great clouds !